Photo: S-F/Shutterstock

Amsterdam's Radical Solution to Its Bike Invasion

News
by Morgane Croissant Mar 4, 2015

AMSTERDAM’S GOT A SERIOUS PROBLEM: it’s a bike-tease. The city’s flat, it has 280 miles of safe cycling lanes, but it has no space for Amsterdammers to park their favourite vehicles.

With 881,000 bikes in a city of 780,559 people and only 400,000 designated bike parking spaces, Amsterdam had to figure out a better parking system to ease the two-wheeled invasion that’s plugging its downtown.

According to The Telegraph, in 2013, the city of Amsterdam had to remove 73,000 bikes that were wrongly park. Confiscating bikes is not only costly, but it also does not solve the issue of the lack of space, so the capital of the Netherland is now going to park its bikes under, and on the water.

The city will dig beneath its waterfront to built a subaquatic a 7,000-spot bicycle garage and link it to the metro system thanks to an underground tunnel. Sounds extravagant? Well, you haven’t heard it all. Two floating bike parking lots will also be created to accommodate 4,000 more bikes.

By 2030, Amsterdam should become “the largest bike parking accomodations in the world“.

Discover Matador